My wife got one of those electronic activity trackers a few months ago and has been diligently walking every day since then. At the end of the day she sometimes reads off how many steps she walked, as measured by her activity tracker. I am always impressed at how many
Did you hear that Prince William is getting a new job? Next year, he’ll fly emergency helicopters for the East Anglian Air Ambulance. The prince, who’ll donate his salary to charity, called his new gig “one of the finest forms of public service.” The Duke of Cambridge won’t get any
If you read SAS blogs but never click through to the comment sections, you're missing some great information. Need proof? Check out some of these comments from the last few weeks. And then leave one of your own. Kelly McGuire has been studying the effects of negative hotel reviews online.
In a comment on last week’s blog asking SAS administrators: please submit your paper idea for SAS Global Forum 2015, Andrew Howell of ANJ Solutions asked if I had any statistics on which were the most popular SAS administrator papers for last year’s conference. He suggested the following nominations although
In a previous blog post, I showed how to use the graph template language (GTL) in SAS to create heat maps with a continuous color ramp. SAS/IML 13.1 includes the HEATMAPCONT subroutine, which makes it easy to create heat maps with continuous color ramps from SAS/IML matrices. Typical usage includes
If you’re anything like me, you are busy. Busy at work, busy at home, busy on the so-called weekend. It never stops. Even as a fitness professionals, my husband and I are right there with you in the constant struggle to find time to exercise and eat healthfully. Here are
If you're a really big company, with many locations around the country, how do you keep track of all that? ... With a great map, of course! I recently read a CNN article about the Community Health Systems network being hacked - exposing the names, Social Security numbers, physical addresses, birthdays
Often there are questions from users on creating histogram using a Log X axis. One such question came up this weekend, where a user wanted a histogram of her data using log axis. Before we get into her specific case, let us first clarify what we may want to see
Before I started my internship with SAS, my only experience with data or analysis came from an “Introduction to Statistics” course I took freshman year to satisfy my math requirement. If I’d known then that statistics and knowing SAS programming would be the #1 skill for a bigger paycheck, or
Heat maps have many uses. In a previous article, I showed how to use heat maps with a discrete color ramp to visualize matrices that have a small number of unique values, such as certain covariance matrices and sparse matrices. You can also use heat maps with a continuous color
In her article Creating Spaghetti Plots Just got Easy, Lelia McConnell has provided us a glimpse into some new useful features in the SAS 9.4M2 release. The term Spaghetti plots generally refers to cases where time series plots have to be identified by multiple group classifications. The support for the
"Trending" is one of those words that's trending these days, as we verbify everything. And if you understood that, then you'll probably love this blog! :-) For those of you not hip to the lingo ('hip' meaning 'knowing about and following the newest styles, fashions, etc.'), dictionary.com defines trending as "to emerge
Are there times when you need to pass special characters to a macro variable but cannot find the right technique to accomplish the task? In this article I’ll discuss the different macro quoting functions and give a simple technique to help you determine which macro quoting function to use. Why
Find out which state you'll live in, if the US state borders are redrawn so we have 50 states with equal population! (Don't worry! - This is just a fun/hypothetical "what if" blog!) To get you in the mood for this topic, here's a picture of one of the many
In my industry of data and computer science, precision is typically regarded as a virtue. The more exact that you can be, the better. Many of my colleagues are passionate about the idea, which isn't surprising for a statistical software company. But in social media, precision is a stigma --
The SAS Global Forum 2015 Call for Papers opened the end of last month! I cannot believe it is time to start getting ready for the conference that will be in Dallas, TX on April 26-29, 2015. As part of the group from SAS who goes to the conference each
Ahhh, summer!! It’s such a beautiful time of year. All the fresh produce comes out of the fields at a rapid pace giving us an abundance of deliciousness and beautiful colors to thrill our bodies and souls.
One of the things I enjoy about blogging is that I often learn something new. Last week I wrote about how to optimize a function that is defined in terms of an integral. While developing the program in the article, I made some mistakes that generated SAS/IML error messages. By
This article is by guest contributor Lelia McConnell, SAS Tech Support. Creating Spaghetti Plots Just Got Easy Sample 38076: “Response by patient and treatment group” illustrates how to generate a spaghetti plot using the SGPLOT procedure. Sample 40255: “Plot of study results by treatment group” illustrates how to generate a
After the 2014 FIFA World Cup, one thing’s clear: here at SAS, we love football (soccer in the US!). To wrap up the popular 2014 World Cup data visualization series on the SAS Visual Analytics Community, we created a presentation that’s chocked-full of interesting insights. From the trillions of pieces
Wouldn’t it be nice to have an expert to answer your SAS Visual Analytics question? Now you do and the best part, it’s free! Beginning September 8, SAS will be hosting a one-hour Ask the Expert session each Monday through November. Each interactive session will focus on a specific Visual
I’m sitting here staring at a book on my shelf entitled, “Impending Crisis”. Even knowing the copyright date, 2003, it could still be about any one of several possible crises: healthcare, financial, energy, education, environment. But no, in this case the impending crisis in question is provided by the subtitle: “Too many jobs,
This fall, you’ll be swept off your feet in the Windy City: The 2014 Midwest SAS User’s Group (MWSUG) takes place in Chicago from October 5-7. With 135 presentations in 11 different sections, you’ll have the chance to expand your SAS know-how and network with fellow SAS professionals.
A SAS customer wrote, "I have access to PROC IML through SAS OnDemand for Academics. What is the best way for me to learn to program in the SAS/IML language? How do I get started with PROC IML?" That is an excellent question, and I'm happy to offer some suggestions.
A few weeks back I wrote an article on Grouped Timeline for creating a stacked timeline for onset of different virus. The idea in that article was to display a stacked needle on a time axis using a HighLow plot. Such graphs are also referred to as EPI or Epidemic Curve
It is a mild summer evening in July at Lake Neusiedl here in Austria. The participants of the traditional YES Cup Regatta are sitting with beer and barbecue chops on the terrace of our clubhouse. The mood is relaxed, and everyone wants to tell their story after two eventful races.
On Facebook the other day a friend “liked” one of her friend’s posts, so it appeared in my news feed. I opened the link, read the article and started crying. You would have too. It was an article by a former social worker in Durham County, N.C. on what it was like
The SAS Middle Tier is all new for SAS 9.4, and you might not recognize it. Gone are the third-party web application servers. Gone is the third-party Java development kit. Missing major components like those may cause you to ask yourself, “Does SAS still have a middle tier?” With the
The Amazon River starts as a small glacial stream, pictured at right, on a mountain called Nevado Mismi in the Peruvian Andes. This, and many other small streams, lead to over 1,000 named tributaries of the largest drainage basin in the world -- and the greatest diversity of life on
What’s not so great about summer? The post workout shower sweat. You know what I’m talking about. You had a great workout: 3 minute warm up, 40 minutes of sweaty intervals, followed by a 2 minute “cool down” which involved you walking from the gym into the locker room. You
